The case of the copyright history of Fritz Lang’s influential sci-fi masterpiece Metropolis is as convoluted as the history of its film print. Lang’s vision, and his original almost-three-hour cut was doomed to censorship right from the start. The Nazis took out its more socialist scenes. It’s been edited, colorized, put back together and restored. Wikipedia currently lists nine different versions. Similarly, who owns the film had shifted from distributors back to public domain, then *out* of public domain the more original footage was rediscovered. And then comes 2023, where Metropolis will once again land in the public domain, at least in America. Will we see as many legal battles as we will see new remixes and re-scores? Probably a bit of both.
Its original orchestral score is available, but many fans also seek out a score more befitting its futurist origins. Something more electronic.
In fact, the four-minute clip above is YouTuber “KarmaGermany’s” 2009 fan-made edit using the music of Kraftwerk. If any band of the late 20th century was born to be paired with Lang’s technological vision, it’s the Fab Four from Düsseldorf. Their icy romantic melodies strike the right balance between Metropolis’ battle, then synthesis, of machinery and the human heart. And, look Kraftwerk even created a song called “Metropolis,” which becomes the actual score above.
Like watching the Wizard of Oz while Dark Side of the Moon plays, Kraftwerk’s “Metropolis” seems written for the film, with its opening fanfare over the shots of the future city waking up, then how it switches to its motorik beat as the workers begin their alienating factory day. (We haven’t done a side-by-side of the extant cut of the film, so there very well may be some editing at play here.)
Now, while this is just a fan’s very well made use of the band’s full catalog (it dives back into the band’s spacier early work for the films more tender moment), others have gone a more official route. Kraftwerk contemporary and member of Cluster, Dieter Moebius recorded a four-part, 40-minute suite Musik für Metropolis. It was released posthumously in 2015, and it is one of his spookier works.
Prior to that, techno DJ and composer Jeff Mills (no relation) composed an hour-long score in 2000 that also had its own accompanying edit, and married his career in both ambient and futuristic electronic beats.
If the Kraftwerk re-edit whets your techno whistle, that clip was just the opening scene of the 90-minute fan edit from John McWilliam. His notes: “Originally two and a half hours long it has been reduced down to one hour 23 minutes to pace it up including removing the subtitle cards between shots and placing them over [the] picture instead.”
The last instruction from McWilliam could apply to whatever score you choose, as long as it’s for Metropolis: “Best watched on a big-ass TV hooked up to a big-booty sound system.”
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the Notes from the Shed podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.
Early home movies have a certain predictable quality. Their subjects wander around, pointing at things. They shoo the camera away with embarrassed grins, cluster together awkwardly, and casually chat up their side pieces in front of their spouses….
The Trotskys took up residence in La Casa Azul, Kahlo’s family home in January 1937, after Rivera persuaded President Lázaro Cárdenas to offer them sanctuary in Mexico.
Shortly after arrival, Sedova wrote a letter to friends, speaking warmly of the hospitality she was receiving:
We were breathing purified air…A motorcar…carried us across the fields of palms and cacti to the suburbs of Mexico City; a blue house, a patio filled with plants, airy rooms, collections of Pre-Columbian art, paintings from all over: we were on a new planet, in Rivera’s house.
Heisler’s slice of life film would appear to be a continuation of this relaxed and happy vibe.
Trotsky pats Rivera on the back and converses animatedly with Kahlo, nearly 30 years his junior. The two women embrace and stroll arm in arm, as the men take interest in a cactus. Sedova seems delighted when Rivera kisses her hand. Then everyone stands around and looks at trees.
Gosh, isn’t it nice when all members of two couples get along so well?
Is it possible, though, that an extra couple was lurking in plain sight?
Shortly after meeting, Trotsky and Kahlo entered into a brief but passionate fling, exchanging sweet nothings in English, concealing love notes between the pages of books, and borrowing Kahlo’s sister Cristina’s house for trysts.
They called it quits in July of 1937, after Sedova caught on and issued her husband an ultimatum.
So we will amend our statement to say, isn’t it nice when two couples get along so well, even after two of them were discovered to be cheating on their partners with each other?
Kahlo’s and Rivera’s extramarital dalliances are hardly news, of course.
Dangerous Minds suggests that part of what drew Kahlo to Trotsky was the opportunity to get back at Rivera for his affair with Cristina — the sister who volunteered her house as love nest.
And in Vanity Fair, Amy Fine Collins details how Rivera “boasted to anyone who would listen” about Kahlo’s same sex liasons, but was apoplectic over her entanglements with men, including sculptor Isamu Noguchi, photographer Nickolas Muray, and Trotsky’s secretary Jean van Heijenoort, witness to the blatant flirtation between the artist and his boss.
The romance with Trotsky “infuriated him most” Collins writes, adding that “long after Trotsky’s assassination, Kahlo delighted in driving Rivera into a rage by humiliating him with the memory of her affair with the great Communist.”
…kind of makes one wish this little film had sound.
The absence of audio is also lamented by viewers of this colorized assemblage of amateur footage starring Kahlo and Rivera.
Trotsky appears again at the 1:03 mark. Dare we describe him as looking smitten?
There’s some speculation that the young woman at 1:17 is musician Chavela Vargas, another of Kahlo’s lovers. In that same moment, Kahlo proves herself as in command of her cinematic image as she was in her self-portraits. She’s as self-possessed as a movie star throughout.
Which makes the early glimpse of her sketching en plein air in a fur coat and Western style hat, feet propped on a low wall, all the more disarming.
It’s rare to see Frida Kahlo caught off guard, or so she appears, smiling and gesturing offscreen toward the ostensible subject of her drawing.
Is there a lip reader in the house?
(Serious question.)
For good measure, here is even more footage — the Kahlo-Riveras at the Casa Azul, as captured by Kahlo’s lover Nickolas Muray, whose famous 1939 portrait of the artist in a magenta rebozo was declared “marvelous as a Piero della Francesca” by her husband.
“To me it is more than that,” Kahlo wrote to Muray:
It is a treasure, and besides, it will always remind me [of] that morning we had breakfast together.
Understandably, some viewers remain disappointed that the snippets of Kahlo on film lack sound, but surely the “voice” in which she wrote her many loves, Diego included, is far more expressive than any audio that a home movie might have captured.
Fifty years after its theatrical release, The Godfather remains a subject of lively cinephile conversation. What, as any of us might ask after a fresh semi-centennial viewing of Francis Ford Coppola’s mafia masterpiece, is this movie about? We need only ask Coppola himself, who has our answer in one word: succession. In the recent GQ interview above, he also explains the themes of other major works with similar succinctness: Apocalypse Now is about morality; The Conversation is about privacy. Such clean and simple encapsulations belie the nature of the film production process, and especially that of Coppola’s nineteen-seventies pictures, with their large scale, seriousness of purpose, and proneness to severe difficulty.
“What we consider real art is a movie that does not have a safety net,” Coppola says, and that applies without a doubt to movies like The Godfather and Apocalypse Now. Much as Orson Welles once said of his own experience making Citizen Kane, the young Coppola went into The Godfather ignorant of more or less everything involved in its content but life in an Italian-American family. But he had, in theater school, learned the techniques of “outwitting the faculty,” and dealing with the higher-ups at Hollywood studios turned out to require that same skill set. He thus found a way to include every element ruled insistently out by the executives, from New York locations and a period setting to performers like the then-unknown Al Pacino and then-washed-up Marlon Brando.
Brando didn’t take part in The Godfather Part II, but he did show up at the end of Apocalypse Now for a vividly memorable turn as the power-mad Colonel Kurtz. As Coppola remembers it, “when Brando arrived, he looked at me — he’s so smart — and he said, ‘You painted yourself in a corner, didn’t you?” The actor meant that the surreal qualities of the film had reached such an intensity that no conventional form of resolution could possibly suffice. This was the result of the fact that, as Coppola puts it, “one of the things that make a movie is the movie: it contributes to making itself.” In other words, as Coppola and his collaborators shot each scene (a process that famously resulted in over one million feet of footage), the very film taking shape before them suggested its own direction — in the case of Apocalypse Now, toward the ever darker and stranger.
Always candid about his professional struggles, Coppola has also been generous with technical and artistic explanations of just how his pictures have come together. Godfather fans will delight in his director’s-commentary tracks on the first and second parts of that trilogy; as for The Godfather Part III, Coppola released a new edit (in the manner of ApocalypseNow’s Redux and Final Cut) called The Godfather Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone in 2020. He discusses that project in the GQ interview, and also his work-in-progress Megalopolis. Having described The Godfather as essentially a Shakespearean tale, he’s now reaching further back in time: “Wouldn’t it be interesting if you made a Roman epic but didn’t set it in ancient Rome — set it in modern New York?” He also lets us in on Megalopolis’ surprising key word: not megalomania, nor ambition, nor power, but sincerity.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Long before it was a nationalist rallying cry in Japan during WWII, the term Yamato-damashii referred to something less like racial imperialism and more like chivalry — the “Japanese Spirit” or “Old Soul of Japan,” as Greek-Japanese writer Lafcadio Hearn wrote. Perhaps surprisingly, the “Japanese Spirit” was not based in the martial arts of the samurai at first, but in the scholarship of China, as the ancient novel The Tale of Genji explains when defining Yamato-damashii as “a good, solid fund of knowledge… a fund of Chinese learning.” This would change when the code of Bushidō evolved, and the samurai, with his elaborate armor and elegant swords, became a central figure of honor in Japanese society.
In The Japanese Sword as the Soul of theSamurai, the nearly half-hour documentary above by traveling American documentary filmmaker Ken Wolfgang, George Takei narrates the tale of the samurai’s sword. The film begins with the legendary character Yamato Takeru (who one scholar speculates may share a common origin with King Arthur). This ur-samurai inherited the first sword from the tail of a eight-headed dragon that was slain by a god.
The sword, nicknamed “grass-mower,” Takei tells us, is enshrined near Nagoya, “the second of the three sacred symbols of Shinto, the national religion of Japan.” When we turn from myth to history, Takei says, we find that the “earliest known swords are found in the… tombs of the ancient Yamato people, who are believed to have inhabited Japan between the 2nd and 8th centuries AD,” and who are the origin of Yamato-damashii.
“As Japan developed, so did the sword,” becoming ever more refined in the country’s Middle Ages, where the weapon reached its “peak of perfection.… Its quality has never been surpassed to this day.” The sword became a soul — and we, as viewers, are treated to an insider’s view of the methods of its forging. The smithing of swords is no mere craft; it is a “religious ritual” that begins with prayers and offerings — fervent imprecations to the gods that the new sword may approach the perfection of a “grass-mower.” The forge is lit from the alter’s fire, and it can take months, or even years, to make just one sword. Don’t miss the rare opportunity to see the process in just over twenty minutes in this short documentary film.
In light of the newly released, Kenneth Branagh-directed film Death on the Nile, Pretty Much Pop discusses the continuing appearance of the works of the world’s most successful mystery writer in film and TV.
Your host Mark Linsenmayer is joined by repeat guests Sarahlyn Bruck, Al Baker, and Nicole Pometti to discuss the recent films, the Sarah Phelps TV adaptations (like The ABC Murders), the Poirot BBC TV series, and some older adaptations.
We take on the different characterizations of Poirot and how recent, grittier interpretations compare with those of James Bond and Sherlock Holmes. Also, how should a screenwriter adapt such fact-heavy novels? What works and doesn’t in terms of modernizing them to current audience expectations? How did Christie keep things interesting for herself writing so many mysteries? How deep do her meditations on psychology and ethics run in these books, and can that be adequately conveyed on screen? What’s the future of the mystery genre?
Anita Berber, the taboo-busting, sexually omnivorous, fashion forward, frequently naked star of the Weimar Republic cabaret scene, tops our list of performers we really wish we’d been able to see live.
While Berber acted in 27 films, including Prostitution, director Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler, and Different from the Others, which film critic Dennis Harvey describes as “the first movie to portray homosexual characters beyond the usual innuendo and ridicule,” we have a strong hunch that none of these appearances can compete with the sheer audacity of her stage work.
Audiences at Berlin’s White Mouse cabaret (some wearing black or white masks to conceal their identities) were titillated by her Expressionistic nude solo choreography, as well as the troupe of six teenaged dancers under her command.
Berber had been known to spit brandy on them or stand naked on their tables, dousing herself in wine whilst simultaneously urinating… It was not long before the entire cabaret one night sank into a groundswell of shouting, screams and laughter. Anita jumped off the stage in fuming rage, grabbed the nearest champagne bottle and smashed it over a businessman’s head.
Her collaborations with her second husband, dancer Sebastian Droste, carried Berber into increasingly transgressive territory, both onstage and off.
According to translator Merrill Cole, in the introduction to the 2012 reissue of Dances of Vice, Horror and Ecstasy, a book of Expressionist poems, essays, photographs, and stage designs which Droste and Berber co-authored, “even the biographical details seduce:”
…a bisexual sometimes-prostitute and a shady figure from the male homosexual underworld, united in addiction to cocaine and disdain for bourgeois respectability, both highly talented, Expressionist-trained dancers, both beautiful exhibitionists, set out to provide the Babylon on the Spree with the ultimate experience of depravity, using an art form they had helped to invent for this purpose. Their brief marriage and artistic interaction ended when Droste became desperate for drugs and absconded with Berber’s jewel collection.
This, and the description of Berber’s penchant for “haunt(ing) Weimar Berlin’s hotel lobbies, nightclubs and casinos, radiantly naked except for an elegant sable wrap, a pet monkey hanging from her neck, and a silver brooch packed with cocaine,” do a far more evocative job of resurrecting Berber, the Weimar sensation, than any wordy, blow-by-blow attempt to recreate her shocking performances, though we can’t fault author Karl Toepfer, Professor Emeritus of Theater Arts at San Jose State University, for trying.
In Empire of Ecstasy: Nudity and Movement in German Body Culture, 1910–1935, Toepfer draws heavily on Czech choreographer Joe Jenčík’s eyewitness observations, to reconstruct Berber’s most notorious dance, Cocaine, beginning with the “ominous scenery by Harry Täuber featuring a tall lamp on a low, cloth-covered table:”
This lamp was an expressionist sculpture with an ambiguous form that one could read as a sign of the phallus, an abstraction of the female dancer’s body, or a monumental image of a syringe, for a long, shiny needle protruded from the top of it…It is not clear how nude Berber was when she performed the dance. Jenčík, writing in 1929, flatly stated that she was nude, but the famous Viennese photographer Madame D’Ora (Dora Kalmus) took a picture entitled “Kokain” in which Berber appears in a long black dress that exposes her breasts and whose lacing, up the front, reveals her flesh to below her navel.
In any case, according to Jenčík, she displayed “a simple technique of natural steps and unforced poses.” But though the technique was simple, the dance itself, one of Berber’s most successful creations, was apparently quite complex. Rising from an initial condition of paralysis on the floor (or possibly from the table, as indicated by Täuber’s scenographic notes), she adopted a primal movement involving a slow, sculptured turning of her body, a kind of slow-motion effect. The turning represented the unraveling of a “knot of flesh.” But as the body uncoiled, it convulsed into “separate parts,” producing a variety of rhythms within itself. Berber used all parts of her body to construct a “tragic” conflict between the healthy body and the poisoned body: she made distinct rhythms out of the movement of her muscles; she used “unexpected counter-movements” of her head to create an anguished sense of balance; her “porcelain-colored arms” made hypnotic, pendulumlike movements, like a marionette’s; within the primal turning of her body, there appeared contradictory turns of her wrists, torso, ankles; the rhythm of her breathing fluctuated with dramatic effect; her intense dark eyes followed yet another, slower rhythm; and she introduced the “most refined nuances of agility” in making spasms of sensation ripple through her fingers, nostrils, and lips. Yet, despite all this complexity, she was not afraid of seeming “ridiculous” or “painfully swollen.” The dance concluded when the convulsed dancer attempted to cry out (with the “blood-red opening of the mouth”) and could not. The dancer then hurled herself to the floor and assumed a pose of motionless, drugged sleep. Berber’s dance dramatized the intense ambiguity involved in linking the ecstatic liberation of the body to nudity and rhythmic consciousness. The dance tied ecstatic experience to an encounter with vice (addiction) and horror (acute awareness of death).
A noble attempt, but forgive us if we can’t quite picture it…
And what little evidence has been preserved of her screen appearances exists at a similar remove from the dark subject matter she explicitly referenced in her choreographed work — Morphine, Suicide, The Corpse on the Dissecting Table…
Cole opines:
There are a number of narrative accounts of her dances, some pinned by professional critics, and almost all commending her talent, finesse, and mesmerizing stage presence. We also have film images from the various silent films in which she played bit parts. There exist, too, many still photographs of Berber and Droste, as well as renditions of Berber by other artists, most prominently the Dadaist Otto Dix’s famous scarlet-saturated portrait. In regard to the naked dances, unfortunately, we have no moving images, no way to watch directly how they were performed.
For a dishy overview of Anita Berber’s personal life, including her alleged dalliances with actress Marlene Dietrich, author Lawrence Durrell, and the King of Yugoslavia, her influential effect on director Leni Riefenstahl, and her sad demise at the age of 29, a “carrion soul that even the hyenas ignored,” take a peek at Victoria Linchong’s biographical essay for Messy Nessy Chic, or better yet, Iron Spike’s Twitter thread.
Berber was addicted to alcohol, cocaine, opium, and morphine. But one of her favorite drugs was chloroform and ether, mixed in a bowl. She would stir the bowl with the bloom of a white rose, and then eat the petals.
Having by now seen Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) more times than I can remember, it surprises me to meet someone who’s never seen it at all. When I do, my first impulse is always to suggest a screening right then and there. This would seem to put me in company with Oliver Stone, who in recent years has been documented engaging in at least one instance of high-profile Strangelove evangelism. As for the new inductee into the Strangelove viewership, he went more than 60 years without having seen the film, but for the last couple of decades had the credible excuse of busyness: it isn’t just a part-time gig, after all, being the president of Russia.
The viewing of Dr. Strangelove comes at the series’ very end, which is presumably an effort on Stone’s part to save the “best” for last — and as Cold War American cinema goes, one could hardly hope for a better selection. Based on Peter George’s Red Alert, a straightforward thriller novel about American and Soviet protocols of nuclear-defense management gone disastrously wrong, the film only took shape when Kubrick realized it had to be a comedy. As he later recalled, “I found that in trying to put meat on the bones and to imagine the scenes fully, one had to keep leaving out of it things which were either absurd or paradoxical, in order to keep it from being funny; and these things seemed to be close to the heart of the scenes in question.”
As Joseph Heller realized while writing Catch-22, certain ridiculous truths about war simply can’t be portrayed non-comedically. As realized through the painstakingly exact filmmaking of Kubrick and his collaborators, Dr. Strangelove is the blackest of black comedies. “There are certain things in this film that indeed make us think,” Putin says to Stone after the closing montage of mushroom clouds. He even credits Kubrick with technical foresight: “Modern weapon systems have become more sophisticated, more complex. But this idea of a retaliatory weapon and the inability to control such weapon systems still hold true today.” Not much has changed since the days of Dr. Strangelove, he admits, and now that he’s undergone his own bout of geopolitical brazenness, let’s hope that he remembers how the movie ends.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Last week we featured the recent discovery of Ernest Shackleton’s ship Endurance, which has spent more than a century at the bottom of the Weddell Sea off Antarctica. It sank there in 1915, after having been entrapped and slowly crushed by pack ice for the most of a year. That marked the end of what had started as the 1914–1917 Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, but it certainly wasn’t the end of the story. When it had become clear that there was no hope for Endurance, writes Rain Noe at Core77, “Shackleton and five of the crew then sailed 800 miles in a lifeboat to Stromness, an inhabited island and whaling station in the South Atlantic, where they were able to organize a rescue party. Shackleton located and rescued his crew four months later.”
Today we can watch the Endurance’s demise on film, as shot by expedition photographer Frank Hurley. “How is it possible that the film footage survived this ordeal?” Noe writes. “After the crew abandoned ship, food was the main thing to be carried away by the men, and Hurley had to decide which photo negatives and film reels to salvage.” Hurley himself later described this agonizing process, at the end of which “about 400 plates were jettisoned and 120 retained. Later I had to preserve them almost with my life; for a time came when we had to choose between heaving them overboard or throwing away our surplus food — and the food went over!”
Even relatively early in the era of cinema, Hurley must have understood the power of the image — as, it seems, did his captain. The footage Hurley could salvage retained a striking clarity, and it went into 1919’s South, which is now considered to be the very first documentary feature. “South was first exhibited by Ernest Shackleton in 1919 to accompany his lectures,” writes Ann Ogidi at the BFI’s Screenonline, “and it has some of the quality of a lecture. Excerpts of the journey are interspersed with scientific and biological observations.” And “just when the dramatic tension reaches its height, there are almost 20 inexplicable minutes of nature footage, showing sea lions gamboling, penguins and other birds.”
Crisply restored in the 1990s, South “is best thought of as that multi-media documentary lecture that Shackleton would have presented with stills, paintings, film and music woven together to spin the yarn, and for Hurley’s exquisite photography that keeps alive the story of that group of extraordinary men.” So writes BFI curator Bryony Dixon in a recent piece on the miraculous survival of not just Shackleton and his men, but of Hurley’s handiwork. And it was Hurley who then went right back out to the island of South Georgia to “take wildlife footage that the newspaper editor Ernest Perris, who sponsored the film, was convinced was needed to make the film interesting to the public.” Perris was daring enough to fund the first documentary feature, but also prescient in his conception of the form — a conception proven definitively right, more than eighty years later, by the box-office performance of March of the Penguins.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
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